Diane downs where is she

Mackey explained the situation to them in two taut words, "Chest wounds! Two of the children still breathed, although strenuously; the boy gasped for air. The child found slumped in the front seat appeared beyond help; despite frantic efforts by the doctors at the operating table, the damage had been lethal. She was pronounced dead moments after being wheeled to Emergency. Only later did the medics learn the children's names and ages— Christie Downs, 8; Cheryl Ann Downs, 7; and Danny Downs, 3 — but names and ages didn't matter yet; in fact, they were the least important factor of this hour, this night, this calamity.

What mattered is that someone without a heart had deliberately attempted to murder three kids in cold blood, and, despite the odds, despite a fate that looked gloomy, the caretakers hastened to keep that fate at bay and beat it at its own game: with deliberate intention. Skilled hands attended to the two operable victims. Feeling the children succumbing to severe blood loss and lack of oxygen, they performed tracheotomies on them to free the flowing blood and salvage much-needed air.

Machines began to pump the little hearts and revitalized the other organs. Despite the children's fragile condition, Mackey and his experts kept them alive. Author Ann Rule, who relates the tragedy in her excellent book, Small Sacrifices , writes, "One child was dead Cheryl. One child Christie had defied the odds and lived through profound blood loss, heart stoppage and delicate surgery. One child Danny seemed stable, but was at risk of paralysis. Who in the name of God could have aimed a pistol at three small children and pulled the trigger?

Their mother, Diane, didn't supply an answer. She told hospital receptionist Patterson that she and her family had been driving home from visiting a friend in nearby Marcola when a man, a "bushy-haired stranger" type had waved down their car on a lonely span of highway.

Thinking he needed help, Diane paused to inquire. And that was when, said a tearful Diane, the man pointed his gun through her car window and loosened its barrel on her three helpless offspring. Both Springfield and Lane County police responded.

To them she exacted the tale of the ambush and an odd description of the vagabond. Reacting to the story, the departments issued an emergency watch on the city and county roads, fearing that there might be a madman roaming the outskirts of Springfield, its lanes and byways.

Squads drew into action and the area described by Diane as the point of attack — in the vicinity of Marcola and Old Mohawk Road, a desolate spot — became the center of a manhunt. Since the crime had been purported to have occurred in the county, members of the Sheriff's Office for Lane County became principle investigators. Sergeant Robin Rutherford was the county's first man to approach the children's mother at the hospital.

When he arrived, the nurses were tending to her arm, which bore a series of small, superficial wounds — marked between the elbow and the wrist — from where she had tried to ward off the gunman's blows. Seeing that Mrs. Downs' injuries were minor and that she seemed to be in an unusual state of calmness — in fact, she seemed in full control of her senses -- he asked that she come with him to point out the exact spot, the best she could in the dark, of the crime.

The site she located by memory, near where two rural roads converged, was, according to Ann Rule, a "most desolated spot where the river pushed by in the dark on one side; on the other, a field of wild phlox trembled in the wind When Diane returned to the hospital, she was given the terrible news about her middle child, Cheryl, as well as the status of her other two children. She took the news with grace, but her attitude stunned the hospital personnel who had expected her to turn hysterical; she seemed too accepting.

When told that Danny had a chance of surviving, she replied in an almost-perplexed manner, "Do you mean the bullet missed his heart? Gee whiz! The Investigation Begins. Detectives who spoke with her in a private room at McKenzie-Willamette were equally surprised at her attitude. One investigator, a sharp, keen-witted veteran of the county's homicide squad who was aptly named Dick Tracy, found her unlike other women whom he had encountered after similar crises.

In fact, he later defined her as "very rational, considering what she had undergone. To that point, they had determined that the bullets that had been fired at the kids were.

Powder burns on the children's skin indicated that the angry weapon had been fired at an extremely close proximity, especially those on the deceased girl, Cheryl, who had been in the front seat.

Blood splayed across the car's doors, seats, windows and elsewhere indicated that the murderer had discharged the gun from the left, or drivers' side, which agreed with Diane's story claiming the intruder had reached in through her window. About the mother herself, the detectives learned that she was 27 years old, was a mail woman for the U. Postal Service and worked the Cottage Grove division. Having previously been a letter carrier in Chandler, Arizona, she recently divorced there from a man named Steve Downs and, after obtaining a work transfer, relocated to Oregon to be near her parents, Willa and Wes Frederickson.

The Fredericksons were former Arizonians who had moved to Oregon years earlier. Wes Frederickson was also a post office employee.

Diane sketched for her interviewers a quick history of that evening: According to Diane, she and her children had eaten a fast dinner at home, then left their small duplex home at Q Street in Springfield, bound for a co-worker's home on rustic Sunderman Road. The friend, Heather Plourd, had told Diane a few days earlier at the workplace that she was thinking about buying a horse, and Diane had found an ad in the newspaper about horse rentals that she figured Heather might appreciate seeing.

Not knowing Heather's phone number — they weren't intimate friends — Diane decided to bring the advertisement herself. The drive, she explained, offered a good opportunity to get the kids out of the stale house for a couple of hours. On the way home after a brief chat with Heather and her husband, Diane thought that she would cut through Old Mohawk Road to the main highway.

She thought it might be fun to go sightseeing; the kids enjoyed watching the moon from the unlit countryside. It was then, after she turned onto Old Mohawk, that she spotted the man. He was standing in the center of the gravel road, signaling, as if for help.

She described the man as "white She braked and got out of her car. It was then that the stranger produced a pistol from under his jacket and demanded that she turn over the keys to her automobile. She refused, but in retaliation, said Diane, he reached past her in through the driver's window and opened fire on her family.

When he then tried to reach for the car keys, she fought back, outstepping him. But, as she slipped back into her car, he fired one more time, at her now, striking her arm. Slamming the gas pedal, her Nissan sped off and away. Her children were hurt, she could see that, and thought only one thing: to get them to the hospital as quickly as possible. Tracy's mind had wandered a moment while Diane spoke. He had read the doctor's report on his treatment of Diane's arm injury: "A single bullet entered her left forearm But, he was not — would not!

And that would not be for some time. Before the interview ended, Diane agreed to sign a search warrant on her home. She admitted she owned a. One lay cold, hidden under rags in her trunk, the other collected dust on a shelf in her home. Meanwhile, police around the hospital were busy. In the driveway, they prepared the red Nissan Pulsar with the Arizona license plates for transporting to the crime lab; for further investigation.

In the morgue, Sergeant Jon Peckels photographed the wounds on the dead girl. Behind ER, detective Ray Poole collected evidentiary bloody clothing removed from all three children.

All personnel assigned to this particular homicide knew, without a doubt, the weekend ahead would mean little leisure time and a lot of pounding on doors, question-asking and rattling of brain cells to figure out this confounding, irritating and heartbreaking mystery. Because three helpless children had their bodies savagely blown open by a gunner, the policemen didn't mind the overtime one bit.

They wanted the killer — now. Several nurses and an investigator were bedside when Diane Downs was finally allowed into the intensive care unit to see Christie, one of her two surviving children. The spectators noted that, as she squeezed her daughter's hand, murmuring, "I love you," she did so as devoid of warmth as an icicle; her words were passed through clenched teeth. Paul Alton, the investigator, noticed something else: that the child's eyes, peeking from above an oxygen mask, took on the glaze of fear when spotting her mom approaching.

Friday morning, plainclothesmen checked with the Plourds to ensure Diane and her kids had visited them the previous evening as Diane had asserted.

Plourd confirmed the visitation, as well as the reason for it: to give her an ad about horses. Under the supervision of Tracy and Kurt Welch, state troopers searched Diane's Springfield residence, requisitioning several items, including a diary that they found, the aforementioned rifle a Glenfield. One particular item, however, interested Dick Tracy: a photo of a young man in a beard that shared space atop the television with other pictures of Diane. Tracy was cognizant of the fact that Diane had made a phone call to a man in Arizona, a former boyfriend supposedly, not long after arriving at the hospital.

Before she knew the state of her children, before alerting her ex-husband and the father of the children, she acted as if compelled to call this Arizona man. Tracy, studying the photo of the man, wondered if he was looking at the object of Diane's urgent phone call. In preparation for what the DA knew would eventually lead to a murder trial, it was Hugi's job to follow the revelations of the case as they surfaced from the origin. As far as Hugi quickly ascertained, the fetus of something evil had taken form in the embryonic blackness of that rural roadway in Lane County.

Whatever happened Thursday night, the facts began to come to light in a most suspicious manner and unlike those explained by the mother, Diane Downs. Hugi, relatively new to the DA's investigative squad, nevertheless knew mischief when he saw it. And he saw it first in the faces of two perplexed, scared youngsters, strapped to tubes and cords for life in a lowly lit hospital room. Never one for sentiment, even he was surprised when he felt tears rolling down his cheeks as he gazed upon Christie and Danny Downs.

And when he heard from Paul Alton the reaction of Christie when she had seen her mother for the first time since the shooting, he knew it was not the normal reaction of any child who, in pain and surrounded by foreign faces, would have been overjoyed to see the one person in their life to rekindle their spirits.

Hugi ordered a round-the-clock guard on the children. He also commissioned a child psychologist to remain at Christie's side during the day, to build up a trust that the child may, when more hale, confide in her the events on Mohawk Road. Doubt in the mother's story was building.

Over the coming days, her version of what happened that night changed slightly. Her placement of the killer when he fired the gun altered in several re-tellings as did her own actions in the face of the supposed gunman.

Welch found Steve Downs an open, erstwhile talker who seemed glad to be rid of his ex wife who, he said, liked to bed-hop. An electrical contractor living in Chandler, Arizona, he carried no grudge and seemed to be happy just to live his current bachelor life. He admitted that he and Diane were "still friends," but that their occasional phone conversations never extended beyond the kids' health and scholastic welfare. He seemed genuinely upset with the bad news and sincerely, fatherly hopeful that Christie and Danny would pull through.

He made immediate plans to fly to Oregon to see them. Welch asked Steve Downs if he knew who the Arizona man might be, and the former spouse, not surprised by the question, replied that he must mean the married guy with whom Diane had been having a torrid affair for some time before leaving Arizona.

He was a postal worker in Chandler and, whatever happened in their love life, the tryst finally severed. The man returned to his understanding wife, but Diane still seemed to carry the torch, hot and heavy.

Her infatuation with this married man was maniacal, it seemed, but he didn't seem the type to leave a doting wife for a woman with three growing, hungry kids. When Welch asked about weapons the couple had owned, and which ones Diane had taken with her to Oregon, Downs told him that Diane had "a.

Why she carried guns? She was a woman and felt she needed protection on her route, Steve Downs suggested. Then detective Welch felt he had to ask the obvious: "Steve, would your ex-wife harm your kids in order to get [the married] back?

When questioned afterwards, Diane denied she still owned the. Evidence Begins to Tell the Tale. Since the beginning of time, wrongdoers have used mythical abductors and thugs as alibis to cover their own or a close friend's crime.

In law enforcement jargon, these make-believe violators are niched under the all-encompassing term bushy-haired stranger , "the guy who isn't there," says author Ann Rule, "the man the defendant claims is really responsible Of course the BHS can never be produced in court.

Rule points to a satirical remark authored by Hugi in the midst of the Downs case. Hugi had side mouthed, "We estimate that if the BHS is ever caught, the prison doors will have to be opened to let out all the wrongly convicted defendants. Paul Alton, Hugi's central fact-finder, summed up his and the investigators' misgivings: "I don't buy it She goes out to Sunderman to see Heather Plourd, she decides to go sightseeing and heads toward Marcola Suddenly, she decides she'll veer off on the Old Mohawk Road.

Say we buy the story that she's sightseeing. Even if it's almost pitch dark, she's sightseeing How do we explain that the shooter knew she was going to be there? If he's following her in his own car But she tells us that the stranger is [in front of her, standing in the road] waving her down.

How does he get there? To the trained hawkshaw's eyes, the picture was incorrect — incomplete — even retouched. If the killer wanted the car, wouldn't he have shot the driver Diane first? She was the adult and would have been his biggest obstacle, not the three tiny kids huddling in the car.

What would a "bushy-haired stranger" have to gain in shooting Christie, Cheryl and Danny Downs? Over the weekend, forensic scientist James O. Pex from the Oregon State Police Department had examined the interior of the Downs automobile to produce some thoughtful findings. As reported to Hugi and his squad, Pex had found a couple of.

No bullet had penetrated the body of the car, indicating that all bullets — between the children they suffered five bullet wounds -- had hit their live marks. Blood smeared the side door of the front seat where Cheryl had tumbled after being shot, and pools of blood stained the rear seat where Danny and Christie had been hit. But, Pex apprised, "No blood at all on the driver's side, no smears on the steering wheel.

If a bullet had hit Diane as she was getting into her car, as she said, it would have been reflex for her to grab that wound with her idle hand. There would have been blood on that hand, then, as she tried to steer the car from the scene, blood on the steering wheel.

Also: When a bullet is fired, he explained, the barrel discharges a small amount of smokeless gunpowder frontwards towards the target. Such powder particles were detected in three angles of the car — on the right panel and in a sweep along the back seat. There were no particles, however, on the driver's panel. What did all this mean?

It could very well mean that whoever did the shooting had been seated in the driver's seat. And that Diane Downs shot herself just before she reached the hospital. Diane's Letters. A scouring of the entire crime area had failed to produce the murder weapon, but ejected casings from a spent. Divers even plunged into the Mohawk River that runs through the topography, but could not find the gun.

Unfortunately, the river churned here and ran a rapid course that time of year, in the spring, and experts determined that had the gun been tossed into the waters, it would have been flushed away miles on the river's current.

Hugi, who figured the courts hadn't much of a case against Diane Downs without the murder weapon, even went to look for the gun himself. He waded along the river, turned over loose stones, kicked through the reed grass, scuffed the toe of his shoe through the ditch alongside the road to upturn loose soil — but nothing.

To sink his spirits further, he learned that Christie Downs had suffered a stroke, a direct symptom of the gunshot wound. Her speech was distorted and, the physicians told him, she may never speak again. The left side of the brain, the side that controlled the ability to speak, had been injured. But, there was hope, albeit slight.

Doctors prayed that, because she was so young, they could reverse the deterioration with therapy and restore her slurring tongue.

There was no gun to condemn Diane. And perhaps the only live witness to the murder, the murderer's own daughter, would be unable to accuse her mother.

But, Hugi, more than ever believed that Diane was guilty when he was shown the diary and the letters confiscated from her home. They both reeked of a longing for the Arizona man, her lost love, a man who, by the tone of the pages, had deserted her. The cause of his desertion may have been — and the diary hinted this — that his wife had simply stepped in to put the clamps down.

One passage caught Hugi's attention. It was dated April 21, less than a month before the crime on Mohawk Road. Like so many entries, it was written in the form of a letter addressed to someone else, but used as a meter to weigh her own thoughts on such a thing.

This passage, like most of the others, was addressed to her former lover, and read:. I'm so confused. What could she have said or done to make you act this way? I spoke to you this morning for the last time. It broke my heart to hear you say 'don't call or write'. I still think of you as my best friend and my only lover, and you keep telling me to go away and find somebody else.

You have got to be kidding.. Hugi resolved to get to the bottom of this business. He kept asking himself, who is he, and is he involved in any way in the murder scheme? He doubted it, but yet he could not get over the feeling that her obsession with this ex-boyfriend had driven her to lift that gun against her own children. They were obstacles in the path of singly obtaining him — and if he was correct in his guesswork, would the man's wife be Diane's next victim?

Diane's letters were visions of fantasies; they spoke of masturbation engendered by thoughts of her one true lover. In one letter, between references to sexual self-pleasure, she rhymes:. Perhaps she could "be strong" no longer, Hugi wondered. Before the weekend ended, he dispatched two of his investigators to Chandler, Arizona, to find out who this man of her wet dreams really was.

The week of May 23rd was a sad one, yet it brought optimism. Cheryl Downs' funeral took place on the 25th to much bereavement from family, intimate friends and the Springfield community.

One of Christie's arms was paralyzed and her speech was garbled for now, albeit doctors believed capable of being revitalized; Danny would probably be crippled for the rest of his life, but his brain had not been affected and he would live.

Both kids had been lucky, totally-against-the-odds lucky. Doug Welch and Paul Alton were dispatched to Arizona to use their professional experience to dig up Diane Downs' past — and anyone, including her former lover, who came along with the shovel work. Their trip during the last weeks of May proved fruitful. They learned just what they wanted to know about their central suspect, Ms. Diane Downs. One of the first things they accomplished was proving that neither Steve Downs nor the mysterious Arizona man were Diane's "bushy-haired stranger".

Witnesses verified seeing them or being in their company in Arizona at the precise hour of the crime. The detectives also spoke with several of Diane's former co-workers from the Chandler branch post office.

Their opinions of her varied. Some, it was clear, didn't like her at all; no one praised her. A few — a very few — witnesses spoke on her behalf, and then only with faint praise. What emerged after the postal interviews was a postcard picture that might have been beautiful had its colors not run together.

She appeared to be a headstrong woman, but headstrong in a tilted way; her priorities were overblown and, most of all, out of sync. She jumped in the sack with men right and left, but refused to deliver copies of Playboy to customers on her route. Diane's former lover worked at the Chandler station, too, but the investigators interviewed him separately, at his home.

To his credit, they liked him; they liked his honesty and directness. He insisted that his wife be there at his side while he candidly discussed even his sexual experiences with his old flame. His wife, he said, knew the history and had forgiven him. The couple had reconciled and he wanted nothing more to do with Diane Downs.

While the memory of his extramarital affair was undoubtedly painful to him, he answered the detectives' questions cordially and succinctly. He had met Diane at work in late after her divorce from Steve Downs.

The man was magnetized by the female's sexy gestures and her revealing clothing. Loving his wife, he was nonetheless taken with this new girl at the mail bin who blared easy virtue in loose midriff and sans bra. Their friendship evolved overnight into a string of sleazy hotel room encounters. He admittedly expected the affair to end swiftly as had all her relationships — none of them had lasted with other men he knew she had gone with.

But as the months rolled on, he found that she was not intending to let go; in fact, she was pulling tight on his private time and urging him to divorce his wife as soon as possible. Suddenly, it dawned on him he was up and over in a relationship he never intended to move from off the bedsprings. He tried to break their seeing each other, but each time Diane protested violently.

I basically didn't have time to think, you know. I was with Diane all the time. Welch and Alton then noted something that Diane's ex-lover added that hit a high-note because it complemented what their boss Fred Hugi had been contemplating all along — that the Downs children may have gotten in the way of their mother's love life.

Despite her pleas, he refused to see when she was with Danny, Christie and Cheryl. After battling guilt for many months, the man decided to say adios to Diane. The girlfriend's remonstrations had been incessant, and one night in February, , he severed them. I said I loved my wife. She blew up. She ranted and raved and screamed at me. I'd never seen anyone act that way before. When he raced home, Diane followed him, even up the steps of his own home with his wife present. I slammed the door in her face.

It had been what the husband called "the final straw" and he never saw her again. Updated Jul 24, at pm. I allow Heavy. Disagree Agree. Notify of. Inline Feedbacks. Would love your thoughts, please comment. The convicted criminal has hit the news again in the past few months after sharing about her life behind bars amid the Covid pandemic.

In March, a photo of her was posted on a Facebook page called, "Free Diane Downs", where she was seen posing with a particularly ironic painting. She tried to kill three of her kids in , but two of them survived. The Sun reported that she has claimed that she was a sexual abuse survivor. Her father allegedly abused her physically while she was a child. Reports also stated that Diane went to Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College in Orange, California, but did not complete her studies since she was asked to leave for "promiscuous behavior".

She reportedly left her home and married Steven Downs in But they separated in as Steven claimed their third son Danny was not his own. After her divorce from Steven, Diane entered into a relationship with Robert Knickerbocker in It has been said that she was obsessed with him.

In the same year, she shot her kids with the intention of killing them in her car at a remote roadside in Springfield, Oregon. She also shot herself in the forearm, police said.